Review/Art; An Expanded Sense Of Pollock's Vision, Rendered in Miniature

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: October 22, 1993

Jackson Pollock's greatness is not an unknown quantity, but there are aspects of it that even today, nearly 40 years after his death, can still be dramatically illuminated. Just such a drama unfolds in a small, stunning show of the artist's paintings on paper at C&M Arts, a gallery that occupies the generous foyer and dining room of the Upper East Side town house belonging to Robert Mnuchin, an art collector turned art dealer.

The 15 works on view were made by Pollock in 1948 and 1949, when he was creating, on canvas, some of his greatest and most influential drip paintings. The selections at C&M Arts are also drip paintings, and also great, but they are relatively small, executed for the most part on paper measuring no more than 22 by 30 inches. At first they seem a little overwrought and precious, even miniaturized, like the Pollock equivalent of Faberge eggs, although this analogy may be encouraged by their luxe surroundings.

But it is quickly clear that Pollock in miniature is still very much Pollock, if not more so. For one thing the small works condense the artist's famous drip technique in ways that are revealing, that reward the viewer with an expanded sense of seeing. The distance between the fine details of the work -- the individual strands and splatters of color -- and their skein-like totalities, is decisively shortened. The eye can take in the parts and wholes of the paintings nearly simultaneously, which is not possible with most full-scale canvases. There is something unaccountably thrilling about having these two levels of perception collapse; one can roam effortlessly over every point of the surface, getting lost within the labyrinthine intricacies of dripped lines, and then pull back for the long view, all without ever moving an inch.

The smaller size also makes comparisons between works easier, which emphasizes the range of Pollock's sensationally radical technique, and also its naturalness. The variety of marks, rhythms, densities and compositional strategies evident here underscores that for Pollock, this technique was not sensational but just a different way of painting, and one he mastered to the point of perfection.

Pollock is usually credited with compressing the creation of structure, space and emotion -- and also light -- into a single instantaneous gesture; this is what gives his art its lyrical, transporting economy. His achievement lies just as much in the way he learned to vary these gestures.

In "No. 22A" from 1948, which feels like one of the earlier works in the show, you can almost see the idea of variety dawning on him. Painted in black enamel on gessoed paper that seems to have been wet (the lines often have fuzzy edges), this work is a kind of primer of possibilities. In a series of relatively separate, mostly vertical incidents, line is languorously extended and looped, is frantically tangled, or gently coiled and recoiled in stacked, wobbly circles. (The different arrangements are so distinct, they almost read as a group of very different personalities standing around a cocktail party.)

In the next work, also thought to be from 1948, the sparely twisted lines and splatters of white paint on black are more Pollock-like, except that the real character of the work emanates from two irregular pieces of canvas, seemingly cut from a failed drip painting, whose silhouettes imitate the attenuated strands of paint.

In most of the other works, Pollock is seen working at full strength, building his lines into his entrancing, trademark all-over compositions. On such an intimate scale, it is especially easy to grasp the individual shifts in rhythm, gesture, color and paint thickness that orchestrate the final image. A number of works begin with a matrix of fine vermicellilike lines, which is then overlaid with networks of thicker lines and blobs, to be finished off in a few finalizing arabesques, often in white.

This is the case in the explosive "No. 33" and especially "No. 34," a work whose masses of thin and then thicker black lines are completed with spatters of silver and loops of white. In contrast "No. 20," one of the sparest works in the show, has no matrix, only spatters and dots, connected by a series of lines so intermittent that it almost seems possible to count the number of times the artist's arm passed over the surface.

Pollocks' economy of technique was backed by a frugal palette. Black, white and silver frequently provide the scaffolding -- a gleaming kind of light -- with a maximum of two or three colors added, usually variations on the primaries. These six colors do all the work in "No. 15" and "No. 16," which hang next to each other in the show, but they are so drastically reapportioned that the repetition is easy to miss. The fact that the skeins of paint twist and curve with a sinuous flow in "15," while "16" is punctuated with a series of short, jabbing diagonals, in black, also obscures the twin palettes.

A comparison between these two works highlights the lesson of this remarkable show: Pollock compressed painting to a single gesture and then made the most, a veritable universe, of what remained.